Diversity in police emoji….

Unicode (the standards body that decides what emoji are available) have released guidelines to address the lack of diversity in emoji. The ethnicity guidelines were released last year (and at the end of August the last major vendor – Google – implemented them). The gender guidelines are not yet ratified, but vendors are already starting to support them.

As with all emoji, they cannot be guaranteed to work every time (so except in rare cases don’t rely on them exclusively). Also, for technical reasons to do with how they are created, some of these emoji may occasionally take up more than one character count in Twitter (especially when submitted through a third party app).

My personal interest is in the Police Officer emoji.

At the moment only the Twitter website, and Apple iOS 10 supports the female Police emoji with a range of skin tones. The male police emoji are better supported with most platforms now offering with a range of skin tones. Luckily, if the emoji is not supported, it “degrades” to a recognisable police officer, with gibberish (other symbols, emoji or square boxes) afterwards.👮